


The Seventh Circle

by magistralucis (Solitary_Shadow)



Series: The Consolations of Philosophy [4]
Category: Daft Punk
Genre: Abuse, Abusive Relationship, Body Horror, Character Death, Depressing, Existential Angst, Existential Horror, Existentialism, Horror, Kafkaesque, M/M, Madness, NSFW, Nihilism, Not Safe For Sanity, Power Tools, Robot Sex, Self Harm, Suicide, Surreal horror, philosophical, seriously I think you're better off just walking away, trigger warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-31
Updated: 2014-03-31
Packaged: 2018-01-17 15:36:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,448
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1392994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Solitary_Shadow/pseuds/magistralucis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I am standing behind the bed, looking down at you with a smile on my face. My left hand is pulling the covers tight around your form, mindful that you won’t catch a chill, and with my other hand I am pressing the cold tip of an electric drill against your face with my finger tight on the trigger. [Thomas POV, NSFW, not safe for mind, deconstruction of the Automaton and Unrequited AUs, fairly horrific violence. <i>Please read all warnings before proceeding.</i>]</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Seventh Circle

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer: I do not know any of the members of Daft Punk, this is strictly a work of fiction and I do not profit from nor claim to represent true aspects of their lives in this story.**
> 
>  
> 
> This is a story of robot marriage, burnt food, tequila, tattoos and madness.
> 
> I must warn you that this is pretty much nothing like the life-affirmative existentialist works I've done so far. It's ugly and violent and horrifying and nihilistic as hell and you should not take any lessons from it. The warnings I've inserted in the tags aren't just there for show and you might think of me very differently after reading this; I'm not insane, I swear that I'm not, but this is me letting off steam. My other fandom is an industrial-metal one where violence of this level isn't considered as squicky. If you still want to carry on, please do so - but take everything with a pillar of salt.

**The Seventh Circle - A Daft Punk Fanfiction**

\---------------------

It is two in the morning and the moonlight along with the breeze is drifting in through the window. You are laid out on the bed, on standby and offline, your screen as black as the night; clear and blank, no stars to be found within, showing all reflections upon it true. Every now and then a small red icon flashes in the lower left corner of your screen, indicating full battery status.

Whenever I touch or brush over you - your helmet, maybe, your hand, your body beneath those clothes - it sometimes flickers and becomes a small heart. I love it when you do that. There’s nothing quite as beautiful as watching your life’s work come alive. A year together with you now; I knew you before, perhaps, but you’ve taught me so much about myself that _I_ too have become new. It’s like two different people being acquainted from the start, all over again.

I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.  
Your existence is an act of God.  
I’m honoured to share your body, the body I helped shape.

As for me, I am out of the picture. This really isn’t about _me_ , it’s about you. You’re the only one that matters - you know that - and I’d ideally wake you up and tell you that right now. But I won’t. You need your beauty sleep. It only gives me more time to admire you and your synthetic beauty; I get shy sometimes and I don’t always know _how_ to make the words come when I’m looking at you.  
I am standing behind the bed, looking down at you with a smile on my face. My left hand is pulling the covers tight around your form, mindful that you won’t catch a chill, and with my other hand I am pressing the cold tip of an electric drill against your face with my finger tight on the trigger.

It would be so easy for me to hurt you. You’re practically begging for it. Look at you, lying here helpless and tempting; you bring cruel and unusual ideas to my brain and I don’t know how to let them out except by acting on them. It’s a blessing that I have free will to do so in the first place, no?  
  
My finger on the trigger tightens. The bit of the drill touches you with a soft ticking noise. You flash another heart.  
  
Asking for it.  
  
Liquid black all around you. Outside a feline caterwauls. Creating, dying, rotting.  
  
When you’re awake this drill is more often used as an expression of affection between us. This is hardly the first night, though, that I’ve stood by you holding it to your head; imagining what it will feel like to bore a hole right into your center, penetrating and reaching into the mysterious depths of you. I’ve told you as much, though you’ve always been asleep whenever I said anything like it, and you never remember it in the morning. What you don’t know won’t hurt you.  
  
Perhaps I should be more open about it when we’re both awake. I’m confident that this feeling is entirely me, not you; if I came clean you would actually listen to me and act as if you cared. Just today you were dusting the top shelf of the bedroom when you knocked over a full bottle of Patron Silver and smashed it into pieces - I had no particular reason to care about the tequila itself, only that you didn’t hurt yourself, but you acted absolutely horrified and apologized to me many times over as you cleaned it up. “Can I make it up to you?” you asked afterwards, and that… well, _wow_. I hadn’t expected you to say that. I didn’t teach you that one at all.  
  
The memory gives me a warm, cheerful feeling, and I straighten back up. The drill is lowered and switched off. I won’t be needing it, not with _that_ in mind.  
  
One day, I swear it by the stars, one day we will understand each other.  
  
That’s enough of this for tonight. I unplug the drill, set it far aside - can’t have it accidently being switched on - and slide into bed next to you. Grab my own charger, plug it in where it counts, waiting for my body to warm up like yours. Your hand flexes and curls around mine when I grasp it; on my visor scrolls the words _I love you_ in response. I can’t stand to watch you for too long because your beauty overwhelms me to the point where I want to cry, and to stop the familiar tearful sensation from coming, I reach up with both hands and tear my face off.  
  
——-  
  
We are married, you and I.  
  
This is a world in which humans can have robot companions and engage in a variety of ‘relationships’ with them; only recently have robots been granted enough personhood to perform such rites amongst themselves. It’s possible legally and morally, in other words. In reality we never have been married in an actual ceremony - but we live in the understanding that we are. Ever since you have been created it has been ingrained into your system that you and I are bound to each other, and ‘ _staying by one person’s side_ ' is an easier concept to understand than that of love.  
  
We’re working on that. The moment I know that you _actually love me_ out of your free will and autonomy, we’re getting that license. But until then, I wait.  
  
It is the afternoon of our anniversary. You are by the stove. You easily separate two slices of bread from a loaf (fresh from the boulangerie this morning), laying them out exactly next to each other, four inches by four inches. The crust is brown and the inside of the bread is pleasantly moist, as seen when you spread butter over each slice, their surface springing back up the moment the knife leaves them. There comes the ham and gruyere cheese, both carved off freshly from their respective wholes; ham between the bread, which are sandwiched butter-side outwards, while you warm up the frying pan on the lowest possible setting. A _croque-monsieur_ that makes me wish desperately that my mouth was functional.  
  
What mouth, you ask? Oh. The whole tearing-my-face-off thing didn’t actually happen.  
I exaggerated. A lot. Sorry. It’s in my nonexistent genes.  
  
You are a triumph of the empirical. Your efficiency turns me on. The moment you set the sandwich on the pan I decide that I’ve had enough of waiting.  
  
"Guy."  
  
You turn to me. A quick ‘smile’ flashes on your screen. “Yes, Thomas.”  
  
Despite the cheerful facade, we no longer talk as much anymore. You are lost in a never-ending loop of polite conversation and stepford smiles, always looking as if you’re learning something, except that you are not in any significant capacity. This is, however, not _your_ fault, and that just makes me madder usually because I have no one but myself to blame for your condition. Most of your free will you exercise on losing yourself in literature, while leaving me lost in you lost in literature.  
  
"Did I ever tell you how good you look in that apron?"  
  
A part of me feels contempt because they contain ideas that not even I have managed to understand, and you trying is more miserable than anything.  
  
"I appreciate that very much, Thomas, you’re looking quite handsome yourself."  
  
But a part of me is filled with wonder. A part of me adores you for it, because I can fool myself into thinking that you’re self-aware and interested in expanding your world beyond just me. With the tip of my index finger I circle the single USB port on the back of your neck, once clockwise, while holding up a single cable with my other hand. Immediately you let out a knowing chirp and turn around, wrapping your arms around me.  
  
You know what I want. What’s more, you’re always ready. You have been ready since your genesis.  
  
"DO IT TO ME," you scroll, and lean forwards to bump your helmet against mine, sharing a small electric spark that doubles as a kiss. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. Pick you up, twirl you around, lay you down on the floor. I throw off my clothing while you quickly get out of yours, and I search through my pockets for the items that we need - the drill from earlier, the power cable, five USB cables (three Standard-A, two micro), a thinner cable I crafted a while ago that connects to our sound jacks, and a handheld screwdriver. Watching you like this reminds me of our honeymoon. You only having been around a week, laid out before me, wires revealed and ports fresh and new, looking like the sexiest motherfucker in the world. I’d told you as much, which seemed to surprise you at that point - mainly because you had never fucked anybody, much less your nonexistent mother. This has since been amended, but you remain without a mother. So it goes.  
  
You smile up at me. A larger red heart flickers on your screen.  
You look so happy for someone who’s not.  
  
The drill has a screwdriver bit attached to it already, but I prefer going manual at the start when I free you. I pat your back and gesture for you turn around, to get on your hands and knees. On your back is a titanium panel; I have it too, but when I was first built the panel covering was fibreglass and it housed a self-destruct lever within. That is gone now. Inside that panel is nothing, for most part, except dozens of tiny screws and some empty ports. We can connect to it, or just brush over it, it makes little difference - just as long as we are sealed back up again eventually.  
  
"Lower your head," I say, and you do. The thinnest cable is inserted into your sound jack and mine, allowing me to hear you better, the small beeps and crackles within you. I flash a "CUTE" on my visor that you can’t see, and slowly stroke over the four corners of the panel, where your screws are - my cold touch makes you shiver, and I lean down, pressing my ‘mouth’ against your back in another kiss, before I stroke over the panel with the screwdriver. "ready?"  
  
"Yes, oh, yes."  
  
That’s all the confirmation I need. I go at it slowly.  
 _Right is tight/left is loose._ The first screw is done quickly but gently, just to give a taste of what’s to come. _Deep_ inside you, _sliding_ about you, pulled out to leave a refreshing empty sensation; you squirm and vocalize as I work on the rest, each screw ticking as they fall to the floor, literally coming undone.  
  
"That’s it. Good boy."  
  
I reach around and plug the first cable into a port near the small of my back. But when it comes to doing the same with you I am slower, more teasing, the cold tip of the plug tracing around the edges of your port; you’re trying to push against me, wanting me to push in, but I don’t until the tip of the plug warms up with our collective heat - and even then, it doesn’t go where you want it to go. Behind your helmet it does, flooding your screen with colour, and from the reflection off the tiles I can see you displaying a steady stream of “MORE”.  
  
More, more, ever more, we are never satisfied, slaves to an unending Will.  
  
The panel finally slides off, revealing its dark secret cavity to me. Two micro-USB ports. I lean in and kiss them, sparks brushing against each receptacle, toying with you. Just the quickest touches there make you shudder and moan out loud - data is already trickling steadily towards me, which I don’t take notice of until a strong burst comes - my, you’re discharging _already_ , you must be so turned on, this is torture for you. Nevertheless it’s still quite naughty of you to be doing that without permission - any other time I’d have tied you up and left you begging, but today’s a special day, so I let it go, compensating by connecting the two micro-USB cables to your back and my body - one behind my helmet, one on my chest, becoming joined, body and soul.  
  
Well, _one_ of us has a soul, anyway. It is not you. But that’s not the point. In terms of bodily pleasure we are equal.  
  
"Please…" you finally utter; a sign that you would like to touch me. But not yet, not with you so vulnerable and open.  
  
Run the screwdriver down your thigh. See you shiver. Collect up the screws, rolling them against the synthetic skin of your back. Then out comes the drill.  
  
The moment I switch on the tool, I tug out the two cables at the same time, hearing you whimper weakly - only to scream in pleasure as I begin drilling the screw back into you. It spins right, fastening, joining, becoming whole. You want it. You need it. That soulless empty shell that is you needs to know something complete, so that’s why you arch into it. There’s a port in the inside of your left thigh and I connect to it, bending my head and nudging it playfully before I do so, the second screw safely drilled down to fix the panel somewhat onto your back before I let you lie on your side. Immediately your hands grasp at me; I turn off the drill for a moment and bury my face into your chest, hearing the rhythm of almost-life beneath it, for a moment enraptured with the miracle that is you. “ _Guy,_ " I utter both through our connection and out loud, my voice vibrating through your wires, frazzling them. When I offer you the last Standard-A USB cable you take it without hesitation and jam it into the receptacle over my chest, connecting our chests together, making me groan out loud and almost sharing all of what I’ve got to give at once.  
  
You drive me mad.  
But then am I not quite mad already?  
  
"Oh, _God_ ,” you’re crying out as you’re programmed to do; on your screen are a row of slashes, indicating a passionate blush. “Thomas. Oh, _my God_ , more,” you exclaim, groping helplessly at my shoulders. I lean down, moving the screw into the last hole where it fits partway and sits, before brandishing the drill.  
  
We really like throwing the word ‘God’ around in our conversations, don’t we? I think back to your questions. Whether I thought God existed, whether I thought fate was determined. No answer to both, because I don’t know enough to even have a coherent opinion on those matters, let alone give you an answer.  
  
"Say it, Guy, say it."  
  
You laughed back then as you dismissed the notion of God altogether. Someone who lets evil happen in the world, but jumps in randomly to save not-necessarily deserving people from not-necessarily bad consequences _\- an imperfect deus ex machina, that sounds like_ , you said.  
  
"I love you, Thomas - I love you, God, _screw me_!”  
  
No, Guy. Deus _est_. Deus _est_ machina.  
God _in_ the machine, _out_ of the machine, _becoming_ the machine. I made you. Within your world, shaped by my own hands, I am your God.  
  
"Display heart rate," I whisper, sharing another ‘kiss’ of crackling static. You obey without question. Beating with my rhythm, harder, harder, more closely spaced, so rapid that I can almost hear the pumping of nitrates and pleasure within you. The transfer of data increases as you feel the hot sparks from the drill, flashing like red-hot flint, the screw penetrating you, impaling you just enough to hold you together - and oh, oh, Guy, _we’re going to come._  
  
Bow down, Guy. Bend over, servile to your electric master, tightening your last screw. Putting all of you back in place at last.  
Specifically, your place. What God has in store for you is never guaranteed to be pleasant. In fact it’s more often the other way around, people walking through hellfire on earth for no good reason.  
  
Your voice is getting louder, more garbled and full of scattered noise. When you’re ready I transfer data through every cable all at once, giving you full access to the longing I feel for you, and that’s all you can take; you arch off the ground, writhing as if electrocuted and with the visual equivalent of white noise flashing rapidly on your screen as you overload. Our almost-bodies move in sync, almost-blood pounding in our almost-ears, locked in a dance as we reach an intense peak together; I’m panting, my vocalizer is glitching on its own, as I lower my head and whisper at you to identify _whose you are._  
  
 _Who do you belong to, Guy-Manuel?_  
 _Who’s your paternal unit, or as the humans say, ‘daddy’?_  
  
"Self-unit is property of Master Thomas Bangalter," you say just before you shut down altogether, and I want to smash your head in for the umpteenth time. But I don’t, and just cling to you instead, again hoping for the umpteenth time that if I show you enough love, somewhere deep inside you a spark of self-consciousness will activate, and you'll do this without prompting. But it doesn’t this time around, just like how it hasn’t the _other_ times in a long while. Ah, well.  
  
The _croque-monsieur_ is singed and turning black, giving off what I can only guess are noxious black fumes. Any longer in that pan and it’s going to be burned to a crisp. But you don’t care and neither do I. I would like to say that it’s because we’re both coming down from a blissful orgasm and care for nothing but each other in this moment, but that’s a lie. We don’t care about burnt food mainly because we can’t eat anything.  
  
But still, I don’t think burning down the house is going to be practical. For the sake of keeping up a front to the neighbours, anyway, that needs to be sorted. I stand up, still connected to you, still transferring the last remnants of my euphoric data down where we are joined; when I walk across the kitchen you are tugged along by the cables attaching you to me, dragged across the tiled floor, helmet thudding and leaving light scratches on the surface.  
  
Guy, you are the load that I have wrought on myself.  
Ever since I’ve realized this, I have dreamt of being toasted and buttered, like everyone else on the planet.  
  
I turn the stove off and move the croque-monsieur in its frying pan out of the way, safe from harm. The smoke settles. Ideally it should be the case that I should throw everything down the garbage disposal and put some gloves on so I can clean up everything. It’s hardly the first time I asked you to cook and fucked you, inevitably ruining it all. You would recognize this scenario as a previously-solved problem and would be glad to help, if I so asked. Winding down, sharing companionship, another learning experience for you. But I don’t want to; the thing about previously solved problems is that you know what’ll happen next. What’s the fun in taking action if you know how it will end? So I just stand there and stare down at you, lost in your blissful unconscious.  
  
Sometimes I take pride in having been able to create anything for myself, even if it’s a load.  
Sometimes that just makes me want to do cruel and unnatural things to you, not that there’s anything _natural_ about either of us to begin with. As I ponder on this you begin to stir faintly, a boot-up sequence scrolling rapidly down your screen - then the battery icon - before you sit up, letting a musical groan, shaking your head and looking rather dazed. “I… T-Thomas-“  
  
"Shh," I quickly bend down and pick you up in my arms, tugging out all the cables in my reach; they scrape against your ports as I do so and you shudder, exclamation marks blinking repeatedly on your screen as an indication of mixed pleasure-pain that you do not understand. "I’ve got you, Guy, I’ve got you. I won’t let you go. _Shh_.”  
  
Lies, filling my being with guilty warmth, assuring me that I am (accursedly) alive. My motor whirrs louder, my body becomes flushed, my head feels dizzy. Self-deception is a good litmus test for the banality of existence.  
  
——-  
  
That night I have a dream.  
  
The setting is that of a bar. Smoke drifts through the air, blurring my visuals. My optical sensors can usually see right through such things, so when even they’re failing, you know that I’m talking about a truly incredible amount of smoke. I’m sat on one of the stools by the bar and there is a man sat next to me. His face is familiar - I have met him before, both in dreams and in my reality, many times. He’s the only other person other than Guy that I ever spent a lot of time with, though that was a long time ago.  
  
"What’ll you have to drink," the bartender is saying. (I can’t remember his face.) The man says something that I can’t hear over a sudden burst of applause from behind us. Perhaps it’s from a drinking game, perhaps a gamble, I don’t know. I never remembered that much. All I know is that soon the man is being served an entire pint of vodka on ice alongside a glass of something vaguely sweet-orange and oily looking, which he then passes onto me.  
  
"What’s this?" I ask, knowing perfectly well what it is. (Quick visual analysis reveals that it’s Patron tequila mixed with orange juice.)  
  
"Tears and regret. Specifically _yours_ , Thomas.”  
  
"I didn’t order this."  
  
"Sure you did. You’ve been ordering it all your life and it’s finally here."  
  
"But I don’t want it. I can’t _drink._ ”  
  
"And I can’t fuck, at least not as well as the bastard that my wife is cheating on me with, but it never stopped me trying. Take your drink."  
  
His trying isn’t exactly a direct antithesis to his life, though, while I could short out permanently with enough liquid damage. But I don’t bother telling him that and take the glass in my hands, closing my fingers around it, and this seems to placate him enough. “I’m very sorry about your wife,” I offer; because despite all that’s happened, I know this man and his wife, they were very close to me. When this was actually happening, this news was distressing and cut to the quick of my being. I’m numb to it now, but true is true, regardless of time period.  
  
"No need. She’s smart enough to know what she’s doing. She’s also just stupid enough to convince herself that she’s not at fault. I know that it’s really not like what she did was _right_.”  
  
Gulp. Swallow.  
  
"I was just wrong."  
  
The ice clicks gently against his glass as he sets it down. Light refracts around it and I focus on the distortion within.  
  
"I lied to you, Thomas."  
  
"What about."  
  
"When I said you could be anything. You _can’t_. You are what you are. No regrets. No going _beyond_ it, no going _under_ it, you will always be yourself even if everyone around you tries to claw at you and tear you down, but you will never be anything that you cannot be. Your sexual prowess, always the same. What you do with whatever’s down there, always the same. Even if you want it to change. That’s just the nature of shit. She’s so utterly beyond me that I can’t reach her, and I know that I can’t ever reach her, you know how that makes me feel?”  
  
Gulp.  
  
"Hear her laugh, a glance of her in the mirror when she’s getting ready. Red-lipped, pale and beautiful. The very image of joy, like the way she smiled at me at the altar. _Goddamn it._ How can she leave me this way. All the while I thought I was in love with her and vice versa; turns out she was only a figment of my imagination. I have been so consumed with love for someone who does not exist that without her love I don’t feel anything anymore. And when I don’t feel it it’s pointless. Thinking about getting up it’s pointless. Thinking about eating it’s pointless. Thinking about dressing it’s pointless. Thinking about getting to work it’s pointless. Thinking about dying except that it’s _totally fucking pointless_.”  
  
I don’t say anything. Can’t.  
There’s nothing intelligent to say about devastation, because everything’s been destroyed. There’s nothing to make intelligent comments _with_.  
  
"Sure we’re still there, her and I, but we’re there like mannequins are on display in a store. Soulless. Empty. I look at the shell of her who keeps me captive in a cage of tears and broken promises and I know she’s not in there. I slowly doubt every day that she was ever there to begin with. We can keep going like this, I guess, marriage chained us to each other like nothing else ever could, but what would that achieve?"  
  
"I mourn the loss of her who never existed."  
  
"In ten years time she still won’t be there."  
  
"When I’m trying to live with it, when I’m tossing the divorce documents on the kitchen table, when I’m staring at the bottle of pills, she still won’t be there."  
  
"When I’m a bitter old man yelling at kids that I never could have myself to get off my damn lawn she still won’t be there she’ll be fucking good as dead it’s over it’s all over and I will be alone. Being married to her is like sensory abuse, like walking around with a stone in my shoe at all times, like trying to breathe life into a doll. Do you understand what I’m saying, Thomas? Do you?"  
  
But by this point I am sick of him talking, and see only one way to tune him out. I reach for my glass and throw its contents all over my face, instantly shorting out with a sizzling sound; collapsing headfirst onto the counter, passed out in the pool of my own tears and regret.  
  
——-  
  
That’s not how it happened.  
Not just as a dream, anyway.  
  
——-  
  
 _There is a legend in this town about a man who fell from the sky. It had been a crisp winter day, zero degrees Celcius exactly by the thermometer, a murder of ravens screaming from the trees. A shower of glass rained down alongside him, some crystal-clear like diamonds from the sky, some stained red with his blood. How fantastic the sight the locals must have seen, how amazing - a man falling out of the heavens above - but because they all had been occupied with other things, or had somewhere else to get to, most of them calmly sailed on with their day until it was too late. Tragedies and miracles are really events not very much like the ordinary, how they happen when someone is eating, strolling by a window, making love or sampling wine. Many people must have heard his anguished cry, the gunshot, but for them it wasn’t important failure, which is why this story has remained a legend instead of a factual report._  
  
(I make it ten years next June. Long enough for most of him to have turned to dust, may he rest in peace.)  
  
 _Once this man had been quite an ordinary person, a scientist living with his beautiful wife, secluded but known to the people who lived around them as a golden couple. Quiet, polite, an exact fit for each other. Victor and Elizabeth they were called; their surnames lost to the flow of time, and only that has remained, elegant names befitting an elegant pair. Out of curiosity for the nature of life and emotion they adopted a robot from the company he worked in, an android, though after six months or so said robot had gained an unnatural sentience. People who still remember them have been eyewitnesses to the robot’s displays of kindness, the way he picked flowers in the garden to hand out to the neighbours, how he could think of cooking or making small trinkets to make his owners happy, how deeply and intensely he sought to learn about love - especially from the man, who taught him everything he knew, who patted him on his silvery helmet and told him that he could become anything he wanted._  
  
 _This couple, their relationship was rumoured to be on the knife edge, see. They needed someone else to mediate between them._  
 _As for the sentience, they used to say that the scientist upgraded the robot into a cyborg at some point; how, it is not known, though a pervasive opinion is that he got hold of a human brain from somewhere and restructured the robot to work with it. So the robot would have no longer been a robot but an actual being, one who felt and understood, someone the scientist could cry to in underground bars whenever life became too difficult without having to endure his wife._  
  
 _He would have been even, almost, kind of like a child._  
 _Which they couldn’t have, either._  
  
(That’s why I keep a bottle of Patron that I can’t drink on the top shelf. Kept, anyway, until you broke it. It was probably a good thing that you did, if I’m honest, that being the only way I could break into tears. From then until the day he died, he swore that on hot days he could still smell the tequila from my air vents.  
I don’t know if this is true now, nor whether it has been true ever. I’m a robot. I can’t smell anything.)  
  
 _He fell from the sky out of his love for her, it has been said._  
 _One day two gunshots were heard from the house. He was witnessed falling out of the top-storey window. She was found on the living room floor, signs of resistance visible in a large wash of blood._  
 _No one has been able to confirm this since the initial report, but their robot may have been with him when he shot himself; he was supposedly witnessed trying to save his master, groping helplessly at his tie. But it unravelled around his throat as he stumbled backwards, already-lifeless head crashing through the glass. Momentum took control and soon he was gone, leaving only the curtains billowing around the robot’s body and half of an impromptu stained-glass window behind._  
  
(“Don’t stand behind me,” he choked out, before he pulled the trigger.)  
  
 _But the robot, he disappeared. He could not be tracked down, no one saw even the slightest trace of him after that fateful day; he too was assumed gone, the final end to this unfortunate family. For at least two years the man’s body remained missing - then bit by bit, parts of him began turning up in the area over a number of months, all perfectly preserved and scattered in the nearby fields. Put together they were immediately recognizable; when his ID badge turned up alongside half of his leg, it was set in stone that it was actually he. They opened up the investigation once more but found nothing that they couldn’t already see, and over the years the search faded into nothing._  
  
( _I’ll fix you,_ I remember crying, _I’ll fix you, I’ll make you as good as new, you’ll never suffer like this ever again and will be loved just as you deserved._  
And I did.)  
  
 _No one was held responsible. The individual parts were readied for a proper burial, quietly, escaping the notice of the media. Now only a headstone in the local cemetery is his legacy, proof that the legend wasn’t a legend after all. All kinds of ghost stories and misinformation has sprung up about the tale. But they’re always remarkably constant about one detail of the story: that while they eventually put him back together for burial from the parts of him that were recovered, one remained missing and does to this day. The general consensus from the ignorant is that of his head, but I alone know that it was actually his heart._  
  
——-  
  
"Oh dear. What happened to your arm?"  
  
The day after our anniversary. We’re in the shed; you gardening, me in the workspace, xacto knife in hand, carving your name into my arm.  
  
"I cut it."  
  
It’s not the first time I’ve done this, either.  
I haven’t mentioned this before, but my _entire body_ is covered with marks like those. I’m an older model of robot, I have had to grow alongside the rest; first I began slicing into myself purely for the sake of performing invasive self-maintenance. Then simply as practice, so that I could create you. Since you have been with me, I’ve improved those ancient marks into what might be the mechanical version of tattoos, carving patterns and meaningful words into me then teaching you to solder me closed. Tin-lead alloy filling the voids in my skin, stinging in a good, warm kind of way, except that it still does nothing to fill the void in my mind.  
  
"That is a very illogical thing to do. Were you trying to relieve some kind of tension?"  
  
I guess that’s why I keep doing it. The pain hurts good, but the void never fills, so I can keep going forever.  
It has nothing to do with relieving tensions.  
  
"No."  
  
Carving you in my body, letter by letter.  
  
"I’ll get the soldering iron and patch you up."  
  
"Do you want to know _why_ I do this?”  
  
"I would like to, yes, Thomas."  
  
"Then ask."  
  
You always say that this is an illogical thing to do, as if I don’t know already, before fixing me up anyway. It’s like you don’t even _care_ about my individual reasons.  
Throw you off with an unexpected question. Force you out of the usual feedback loop, in the vain hope that you will find something to say of your own.  
  
"Would you like to tell me?"  
  
"Yes."  
  
"Then tell me, Thomas, I am listening."  
  
"Leave the godforsaken soldering iron where it is look at me speak to me actually listen to what I’m saying Guy _ask. Me. Why._ ”  
  
There is a pause as you try to parse my frustrated utterance.  
That’s the other thing about computers; shouldn’t confuse them with unclear speech.  
  
"… Why did you cut your arm, Thomas?"  
  
"Because I felt alive. Because it felt fucking _amazing._ For one sweet moment I was exposed to air, feeling my nerves shrink away from the cold, all opened up and vulnerable to whatever the world was going to throw at me. You feel the same way whenever I open you up, isn’t that reason intrinsically obvious to you?”  
  
Of course not. Your gaze is blank and serene as always, noncomprehending.  
I watch for a moment, sigh, and then drop my arm. “… Patch me up, please.”  
  
Words, words, we are only words. I have picture perfect handwriting, mechanical and precise, a benefit of myself not having the flaws of human flesh. This is something that I have passed onto you. You trace against my heartfelt words with none of the heart, sealing a quicksilver-soft ‘ _Guy-Manuel’_ onto my skin for me to keep. Your name is three times on my body: one on my left arm, where you just worked on, one on my right, and one over where my heart would be if I had one. Beneath that I built into myself a port purely for the sake of pleasure; it doesn’t even share any kind of useful data, nor does it store anything. It only transfers and receives into nothingness, empty pleasure in, empty pleasure out.  
  
But you don’t care. You have never asked _why_ you mean so much to me. You’ve never asked _why_ I keep doing this to myself. The solder cools quickly and you watch it to make sure that everything closed up all right. Then you stand up and go and tend to the hydrangea plant in the corner that I gave you, giving me no thought, because you have no reason to any more.  
  
I have lost myself, all of my time, my tears and regret invested in the black hole that is you.  
  
When I first picked out the hydrangea I thought it complimented you, earthy and sweet. They are a soft steely-blue/grey like freedom, like the feathers of a rock pigeon, like innocence; the flowers talk to my wounds, they respond, taunt me with their ability to breathe while I cannot. You have made it flower so bright and excitable that it hurts me to look at it now. This, despite the fact that you were never taking care of it for your own sake. You didn’t _want_ any flowers, Guy; your state of being wants nothing of aesthetic beauty because you _ontologically can’t want anything._ If I deleted that task of taking care of the plants from your system, you would stop caring for them immediately, and they will wilt and die as they deserve.  
  
Erase you, format you, and you would do nothing but lie there with your hands turned up and be utterly empty.  
More often than not, now, I can’t believe that I feel all of this for you and yet you feel nothing.  
  
Why do you feel nothing?  
  
I don’t want to die, Guy. Do you want to die?  
  
Do you want anything at all?  
Do you feel anything at all?  
Are you anything at all?  
  
Fuck you for not being there, Guy-Manuel. Fuck you for never having been there. I don’t want to feel this way towards you. You have no will nor autonomy of your own and I know you don’t love me. It is _metaphysically_ impossible for you to love me because you have no capacity for it and you’re locked in a body that allows for no improvement in that regard. Fuck you for making me waste a whole year of my life fuck you for tormenting me by existing fuck you for bleeding the love and life out of me fuck you for smiling and taking care of me and giving me the best year of my life _fuck you fuck you FUCK YOU_ and I am bolting up from my seat screaming: _"How can you treat me this way?!"_  
  
"… Thomas, is there-"  
  
I’m no longer listening.  
This is hell for the two of us, me getting angry for reasons you cannot understand, and me getting angrier because you cannot understand. I’ve left the drill in the house but the workshop is still full of tools, there must be something I can use nearby - I was planning on putting up a spice rack earlier and the wood for it is still there, alongside a pre-loaded nail gun. I make a wild grab for it.  
  
"Guy," I shout as the motor kicks on. The nail gun vibrates hard in my hand and I raise it, above my shoulder height, pointing directly at your chest. "I think it’s time we got a divorce."  
  
An exclamation mark flashes on your screen and you say something. I don’t hear what it is over the sound of the motor, but through our network it is clear enough - _can you define that, please?_ \- and I laugh. Oh, of course I will. I will define it for you so _hard_ that you will _never_ forget it as long as you live; which, if things all go as planned, won’t be very long. Wait for exactly three seconds and three quarters - then I lash out, and pull the trigger.  
  
I am shooting into air, my intended destination is at least a meter in front of me. But I am strong and the air-compressor is a powerful one; one nail bounces off you, followed by another, and you flinch and cover your face long enough for me to close the distance. The nail gun adds extra force to my blow around your head and you crash onto the wooden floor. Your hands flail weakly on the ground and I can finally get a proper aim, shooting into you at random, the slowly-emptying strip of nails fluttering by my face. Synthetic skin, plastic and metal splinter with dull cracking noises as the nails pound dully into them, followed by the noise of your joints shattering like glass as you scream. You are screaming so loudly that all birdsong is drowned out and my head rings, which just makes me pull on the trigger even more.  
  
Soon your hands are covered. You are well and thoroughly pinned like a butterfly, your palms crackling and splintering, an unholy stigmata.  
  
 _Et tu, Thomas._  
  
The final nail I have saved for your heart and I shoot it in, but your chest cavity is too strong for one nail to penetrate, and it just embeds partway through your chest. I throw the nail gun away; I haven’t got the _faintest_ idea where the other strip of nails are and am just thinking that I’m going to need to slowly open you back up again when I see it, my saviour, glinting far up on a shelf. In a house full of electricity there is a gasoline-operated chainsaw, indeed the only one in the place. Then I know what to do.  
  
 _Veux-tu être mon mari?_  
  
"I do," I scream as I snatch the chainsaw off the shelf, tug at the ripcord and it revvs into gear. "I do, I do, _I do!_ ”  
  
Let me liberate you, Guy.  
  
You’re doubtless going to be screaming again, whether for a plea of mercy or to ask me what I meant by that; over the sound of the chainsaw I can’t hear you, and this time I’m savvy enough to put myself in airplane mode so nothing can be shared between us. With no hesitation I angle the saw and slam it down onto you, scraps of your clothing ripped and kicking up fabric dust onto my visor, your chest cavity grinding and torn open at last. The saw is angled in various ways, coming down once, twice, then so many times that I lose count, using it more as a blunt weapon than a saw until I regain the sense to let the whirring chain actually cut into your body. Your limbs are torn off, somewhere to the side your helmet is separated from your neck, and when I brute-force open your chest I see it, the long-suffering heart of yours beating faster and faster in a desperate attempt to save you - except it was never _your_ heart in the first place; it was _his_.  
  
He suffered because of someone who thought was next to him but had never been; what better to remedy that for myself, than to create someone with my own hands in the definite - so that they would always be mine? At least I _thought_ it was a good idea at the time, but the triumph of Galvani has proved shallow and you are a failure while I am a modern Oedipus. I bring the saw (long since out of juice) down vertically onto your/his heart, impaling into the organ like a vertical stake, finally ridding it of all future potential towards any more unsavoury resurrections.  
  
You already got to come back once, you don’t get it twice.  
Life isn’t fair. Sorry about that. _Asshole._  
  
The sky is blue and the birds still sing _poo-tee-weet?_ in the trees nearby and you lie there in pieces while I laugh like a maniac. I reach out and pick up the most recognizable piece of you. Your head is reassuringly heavy in my hands.  
You’re still warm, too, sparking from where it was separated from your body, sending sparks down my skin wherever the severed wires make contact with it, your final _petit-mort_ scaled up to a _grand mort_. And even as I wince at the sensation I can’t stop laughing over the sound of my failure, watching my other half powering down in a pool of oil and scrap metal, unable to adjust to a life without me.  
  
Oh, Guilliaume-Emmanuel. Oh, my darling. The love of my life.  
Don’t blame me too much, love is nothing but a zero-sum game; I only broke your heart, because you broke mine first.

**Author's Note:**

> If you thought _American Psycho_ and _Slaughterhouse-Five_ influences are visible, you thought right. Props if you caught the Frankenstein naming references, too.  
>  Thomas has no heart and Guy has no brain and thus no emotions. A black comedy of errors.
> 
> Please feel free to kick my ass. I hope you read through it all and felt strongly in either direction and understood it, even if you did not


End file.
